THE SOVIET PRISON SYSTEM IN THE WESTERN LANDS OF UKRAINE: 1939–1941

Abstract

The article analyzes specific aspects of the organization and functioning of the Soviet prison system in the western regions of Ukraine between 1939 and 1941. Under the harsh totalitarian system of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and under Stalin’s regime of personal rule, one of the key and most effective instruments of social transformation and the establishment of the communist model of society. The USSR’s aggression against Poland and the Stalinist regime’s annexation of Western Ukrainian lands were accompanied by largescale terror against the local population; furthermore, the process of Sovietization Volyn and Eastern Galicia – and subsequently, following the Soviet invasion of Romania, Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina – necessitated the establishment of an extensive network of prisons to hold numerous “enemies of the people”. In total, the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs system across six western regions of the of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic – Volyn, Drohobych, Lviv, Rivne, Stanislav, and Ternopil – comprised 22 prisons; according to incomplete data from June 1941, they held approximately 20.300 people. The article analyzes the chain of command for prisons, their division into five categories, the NKVD’s regulations governing prisons, the use of informant networks within prison cells by state security agencies, conditions of detention, and various methods employed by investigators to fabricate cases against prisoners. Among the common methods of tampering with investigations, the following are worth mentioning: the manipulation of witnesses, who were coerced through threats into giving the required testimony; the drafting of statements in the absence of the accused, who were subsequently forced to sign such “documents”; drafting statements according to pre-determined templates; altering statements that had already been signed; forging signatures; and so on. Alongside physical coercion, the investigators were equally adept at applying psychological pressure, promising prisoners lenient sentences, better conditions of detention and visits from relatives, whilst threatening reprisals against their families, and so on. Considerable attention is paid to the issues of evacuation and mass executions of prisoners at the beginning of the German- Soviet war: according to the Camp Administration of the NKVD of the USSR, 8.789 people were shot in prisons in the western regions of Ukraine in the summer of 1941